A Gay Wedding Full of Mormons

My account of the day I cannot forget

(n.b. As is my custom, this piece uses Mormon as shorthand for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who express a preference to avoid the nickname. I usually do not make a note of it, but particularly in a piece like this in which I express deep gratitude for the LDS people in my life I want to emphasize that I use the shorthand out of longstanding personal appreciation for and familiarity with the term, not with intent to dismiss their faith or preferences.)

To my surprise, my wedding day was the best day of my life.

Yes, yes, I know that's how people always said weddings were supposed to be. But I've never been much of one for big events, for ceremonies, for pomp and circumstance. While I've never been persuaded by messaging like this, it's been a big part of the water in which I swim:

Count Jim Moriarty @CountMoriarty

@Backpainandwine Better option is not to have weddings at all and invite no one. Why pay tens of thousands of pounds for a single day when the marriage probably won't last and you won't see half of the relatives again. I can't think of a worse waste of money and time.

So much cost, so much fuss, so much demand for people to fly out and set time aside and dress up. The notion of an event inspired more tension than excitement for me, and my husband-to-be would just as soon have wandered into a courthouse one Saturday and called it a day. But I felt a sense of duty and one of ritual importance to bring friends and family together for a core moment in my life, particularly since I've been something of a nomad throughout my adulthood. I'm a latecomer to this sort of appreciation of tradition and ritual, at times willing to occupy forms without fully feeling the value of them. So I gritted my teeth and elected to prepare a traditional wedding over my own trepidation and the shrugs of the man I love—or at least as traditional a wedding as is possible when one leaves the faith and culture of his ancestors and marries not the Mormon-woman-in-a-temple he had always been taught to plan for, but a man he stumbled across on a dating app.

It was an unusual event, but a joyous one—not only for the chance to call the man I love my husband, but for the many friends and family members from various corners of my life who showed up to offer their support and love. I have lived an unusually fragmented life—my childhood in Utah, my Mormon mission in Australia, my jumping from place to place for work, my pseudonymous writing and work online—coming into and out of contact with a great many people I care deeply about, and my wedding provided the first chance I've ever really had to take people from those various fragments and give them a glimpse of the whole picture and the wonderful man that life has led me to. We married in front of an old mill in an aviary, under an arch with a Chinese double happiness sign hanging from it, our sisters standing by our sides as our ring-bearers and best men. Even the weather was generous to us, threatening rain all afternoon but providing only enough of a hint of it to shield us a bit from the August heat.

I am a terrible planner in the best of circumstances, and I can't pretend my wedding planning was any less chaotic or slapdash than it would have been for any other event someone was unfortunate enough to put me in charge of. But there were a few key decisions I made, and many key decisions others made, that came together into a day more beautiful and perfect than I could have hoped. Given that, I feel a sort of responsibility both to write what I would have wanted to read about weddings for those who might find themselves in a similar spot (and, after all, who has not found themselves planning their own gay interracial marriage full of Mormons and weird online friends once or twice?) and to capture how the day felt for my own memories.

Inviting the Lads

People often say the internet isn't real life, but I frankly see that as only so much cope. Pseudonyms or no, I have never been able to detach my online presence from who I am. No, I don't see people's faces, learn their names, or hear their voices online. Offline, though, I don't have nearly so many opportunities to take deep dives into topics I care about with people willing to respond in kind. You bare different parts of your soul in different places, and I place real value on the friendships I've built online. One of the earliest decisions I made with my wedding, then—inspired in part by a friend whose face I saw for the first time when I flew out to his wedding—was to invite a few groups of online friends.

The specific people came down to serendipity as much as anything. I wanted to limit my online invitations to groups rather than individuals to avoid pressuring people into a setting where they would know only me. Behind the public-facing internet, there exist secluded webs of conversation, stumbled into largely by chance, blossoming into occasional beauty with another roll of the dice. I've happened into several of those groups and grown particularly close with one or two, but am not sure they can genuinely be planned. Many I consider good friends or would love to have as friends happened to not be in one of these groups; prior attempts at forming similar societies emerged stillborn. I tossed group invitations into the abyss, and was happily astonished when some twenty online friends took me seriously and elected to attend, with most of them renting a grand mountain mansion for the weekend.

I'll let one of them describe the weekend as a whole, should they choose to do so. For my part, I'll say that there's nothing quite like meeting good friends for the first time, suddenly matching real faces and real names with the formless thoughts and pseudonyms you've had countless conversations with. It's not often I have to guess which of my friends is which, with a pleasant mix of surprise and inevitability as each persona gets matched with a body—of course that's how he would look and act. Their presence carried a sense of mystery and excitement through the weekend, a bridging of worlds that rarely have occasion to meet. Online conversations merged seamlessly into offline feasts and partying; family and friends with the good sense not to be terminally online got a glimpse of the internet misadventures that swallow so much of my time and the people I spend so much time writing alongside.

It was an unmitigated success, and I only wish I could have invited more. We even have engraved cups now, thanks to the ingenuity and generosity of one of the lads, and with them an implicit promise of many gatherings to come.

Oh, and I can assure you that any rumors of "weird cult nonsense" at my bachelor party are wholly unfounded.

The Whimsy Library

Neither my husband nor I are particularly materialistic, and I have never been sold on the tradition of wedding registries full of household goods. When I need something, I get it; if I've been doing without, I prefer to keep doing without. I remember one friend's wedding with fondness in all regards save the thank-you note I got for giving them a spiralizer from their registry. I was glad to give a gift and wanted it to be worthwhile for them, but I can't pretend to any sentimental feelings towards spiralizers.

We would have been happy to forego gifts altogether, but my instinct was and is that many people value gift-giving as a part of the ritual of weddings, in a way that "No gifts, please" and "In lieu of gifts, please consider making a donation on our behalf" (while understandable options) don't quite capture. To bridge that tension, I settled on perhaps my favorite personal decision for the wedding: in lieu of traditional gifts, we asked each guest who wanted to provide a gift to bring a book they thought we should have and expected nobody else to bring.

This made each gift fascinating, personal, and charming: books that served as reminders of inside jokes, or the connections that drew us to the people present, a catalogue of people's favorites or a mirror of how they saw us. Beautifully bound stories to read with our future kids, cookbooks with cuisine holding personal meaning to the givers, a comic with a panel I quote to anyone who will listen, and all throughout peppered with heartfelt and moving reminders of those who gave them to us. I hope to catalogue the full Whimsy Library soon and expect it to remain a treasure in our home throughout our lives.

The Mormons and the Gays

On my wedding day, I learned that two more of my young cousins have elected to begin gender transitions—and that the two girls I went on dates with in high school now date women themselves. I got to welcome a friend whose groomsman I had been and now-her wife, having gone from their once-straight wedding at a Mormon temple to my gay one at an aviary. With them, I got to see my uncle, remarried to a man—which I only learned when I announced my own engagement on Facebook—and my older brother, once married in a Mormon temple before joining me outside the faith. All of us grew up deeply enmeshed in Mormon faith and culture. All of us now find ourselves navigating peculiar new pathways opened to us by shifting cultural tides.

Alongside them, I was deeply grateful to welcome dozens of active Mormons among my family and friends: grandparents, aunts and uncles, parents, my younger siblings, childhood neighbors and longtime friends. One neighbor in particular, who I had lived next door to through my whole childhood from the day he was born, was gracious enough to stop by less than a month before he heads out on his own Mormon mission. Many of my family and friends are devout, whether via strict adherence to Mormon orthodoxy or a determination to find a pathway forward within the faith through and around their own questions.

I owe a great debt to the communitarian bonds and the social fabric of my erstwhile faith, a debt apparent throughout the planning and execution of the wedding. The photographer was a friend of my dad's from church, the wedding planner a church friend of my mom's. Rather than rent linens, we borrowed them from the local church woman's organization my mom leads as a volunteer. At every step, I relied heavily on my parents' help. As I say above, I am a poor and slapdash planner at best; without my parents' selfless, tireless efforts and their ties within their Mormon communities, I cannot imagine the wedding having gone nearly so well. Even standing outside my own tradition, I inevitably lean on it.

Understand this: I know perfectly well the precarity of my position. I stepped away from Mormonism deliberately, after careful consideration, and without regret. The life path I have chosen is now fundamentally incompatible with its tenets. There is no telling of my life and family story that does not entail, on some level, a sense of brokenness and tragedy. From the faithful perspective, I am a determinedly wayward sheep who has brazenly abandoned the path to eternal happiness. From my own, the foundation of my culture—the path my family has devoted their lives to for as long as it has been a path to follow—is a scintillating mirage woven from the imagination of a man determined to sweep the world into a story of his invention. Neither I nor, I suspect, my family members can view the picture of my family and my once-neighborhood without a lurking hint of sorrow.

Mormonism is not an aggressive faith, for the most part. It's been years since someone has seen a need to condemn my pathway to my face, and even those who did those years ago tried to do so from a place of love. You learn from the invitations left unanswered and the messages left unsent which of your loved ones no longer know how to fit you into their worlds. Most of the time, those bridges had been neglected and left slowly falling into disrepair regardless, but some of the silences do sting.

But we persist. I hug my friend and wish him well on his journey to spread the message of Joseph Smith; he hugs me back and wishes me well in a marriage even Joseph Smith could not have imagined. I hug my grandparents and they welcome my husband into their family and into their prayers. I hug my little cousins, who I watch choosing new names and new clothing, and find that it's my turn to fret as I see them entering paths to more complicated and—I fear—less peaceful lives. We take family pictures and have family dinners and enjoy each other's presence on that rare occasion we have all had an excuse to travel to the same spot. We embrace the moments we get, even knowing the contradictions that underlie them.

I can't help but think of the musical Fiddler on the Roof as I watch the continued development of my family and childhood friends. This tension between traditional communities and sweeping modernity is not, itself, a new experience. The story of an orthodox Jew watching his daughters marry outside his tradition around the turn of the 20th century repeats with Mormon parents watching their son marry a man in the 21st, and has repeated many times and many places. Perhaps this, too, is tradition.

There is an inherent tension in this position, one that can never wholly depart. But life has always been full of tension, and people have always found a way towards beauty regardless. I do not need to resolve the impossible to appreciate celebrating my wedding day alongside the Mormons I love, nor they to celebrate with me. They are there in the moments that matter to me; I aspire to be there in those that matter to them—finding our own triumphs, making our own mistakes, and building what we can.

The hint of tragedy is inevitable, but I am extraordinarily lucky. The Mormons in my life have always been uncommonly good to me. My family and friends were unreserved in showing their support for my husband and me at our wedding. A gay wedding full of Mormons is a peculiar thing, but it was a gift I will cherish.

A Word on Words

That's enough of the bittersweet. It's something I wanted to address, but the moment was one of joy, and I don't mean to summon a cloud that was not present.

Instead, I want to talk about that most dreaded of occasions, the wedding toast: the moment when someone stands up to talk and the crowded room waits with bated breath to find whether they've subscribed to ten minutes of loose rambling or a tightly prepared minute or two of charming memories. I can't objectively say whether the guests who gave toasts were uncommonly good at the task or whether my husband and I were just primed to love everything they said—and certainly that played a part—but the toasts linger in my heart.

We chose three speakers each, all from disparate corners of our lives: our sisters who could speak to our upbringings, my childhood friend who saw more of my development than almost anyone else, my husband's college friend who came with a group of seven others from the same storied dorm, a representative for my weird online friends who could speak a bit to my peculiar double life, and finally a couple my husband works alongside—friends of ours who were perhaps the only people there to really know us as a couple.

While we hung on every word they had to say, I suspect even those long-suffering readers who have read this far would be less eager than I am to hear a blow-by-blow of each toast. I will focus on only two moments, points where the speakers had prepared long before they could have known they would have wedding toasts to give.

My husband's college friend, it turns out, put me to shame, collecting all of the embarrassing stories about my husband of the sort I should be inflicting on others. Here are a few of the ones he shared at the wedding:

• My husband has some peculiar eating habits, from a pathological fear of salt to an inhumanly large appetite—he tends to eat dinner out of a mixing bowl. Rather than gorge himself to obesity, though, he instead eats more vegetables than any man alive. As his friend told it, he would grab a twelve-ounce freezer bag of broccoli each night, warm it up, and have it alongside whatever he ate, but one day planned poorly and found himself without broccoli during a storm. Not content to go without for a night, he marched through the storm to the nearest grocery store, grabbed his broccoli, and returned triumphant with his feast. He has since upgraded his approach, adding a bag of green beans to that bag of broccoli every night. Even after a four-course meal at our local reception the other night, he ate his beans and broccoli. But I digress.

• Given the choice between a familiar restaurant and something new, my husband will pick the unusual option every time. It was no surprise, then, when he insisted on dragging his friends to a Japanese restaurant with some odd options one time they travelled to another city. Asian food, he had insisted, was what he was in the mood for, so they obliged. Upon arriving at the restaurant, he glanced at the menu and promptly ordered, ah, a hamburger. He maintains it was justified because the burger had wagyu beef, but his friends were not impressed.

• A couple of times, my husband got, well, a bit mixed up about objects or locations. He pulled the friend excitedly down to the kitchen to eat mangoes one day—oddly round and fuzzy mangoes, that is, with wrinkled pits. Some of us know them as peaches. Another time, he had begun to fixate on Taiwan, expressing interest in visiting or trying more of their delicious food—you know, pad thai and massaman curry and the like. Since then, he's cleared up the difference between Taiwan and Thailand, and evidently first experimented with making his (excellent) Thai curries at that time, so it all seems to have worked out.

Always keep a running tab of embarrassing stories about your friends in case they ask you to toast at their weddings. Their spouses will thank you.

As for me, I was doing alright keeping my tears in check at the wedding right up until my sister's toast. But she ambushed me. Her whole toast was deeply personal and moving. I won't embarrass her by repeating all the too-kind things she said about me, but my account of the night wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention the paper she quoted in the toast and handed to me after it.

When she was twelve—as I learned during her wedding-day toast—on a school assignment to write about an important person in her life, she chose to write about me. I don't know that another piece of writing can ever move me as much as that school essay, presciently noticed and saved by my mom, did. I'll quote only a few excerpts:

Without [Trace] [...] there would be a huge void in our lives. He is our troubled genius. [...] He could be anything he wanted to be, if he chose; but there is nothing he wants to be. [...] [Trace] listens to me when I need it, and gives advice. Yet sometimes I think he is the one who needs advice, who needs comfort. He has a hard time at school, often. He doesn't always get along with teachers. I wish I could help him. I wish I could make things easier for him—he is so smart, but he has a hard time. However, I trust him and hope for him to come out on top. I love my brother [Trace].

She ambushed me with that. At my wedding. Then she went on to note, rightly, how amazing my husband is and how good he has been for me. I sobbed.

She wasn't wrong to note that I was a deeply unhappy teenager—it took me close to a decade after she wrote that assignment to really come into my own. Her life, between then and now, has been much rougher than she or anyone deserves. I was terrified while I was in Australia that I would come home to the news that she was no longer with us. But she, too, has come into her own. You should have seen her, there at the wedding. She was magnificent, wholly in her element, for once attending an event at a place she's helped host events for years. She prepared much of the decoration, she helped lead setup, she directed the guests. And then she ambushed me with that.

It's hardly fair.

The Vows Under the Arch

As I planned this wedding, the recollections and advice of my friend Gemma in particular lingered in my mind, perhaps nowhere more so than in her thoughts on vows. That essay shapes and reflects my own thoughts on the value and limits of tradition—"We can shop around, make alterations, import the wisdom of our ancestors where it seems good and quietly ignore it when it seems bad"—and I referred back to it regularly when thinking about my own vows to my new husband. In the end, this was my vow, paired with a few sentences to express my love:

I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband and the companion of my heart—to have and to hold from this day forward, in joy and in sorrow, in strength and in weakness, in sickness and in health, to grow together and to build together, as long as we both shall exist.

I opted to depart from the traditional form more than Gemma did, choosing words that evoked it without fully occupying it, before shifting more fully towards my own form at the end. The nods towards growth and building reflect my own preoccupations, capturing the image of marriage I hope to live up to—one where the image of being perfect just as one is gets set aside for one of mutual determination towards progress towards what one could be.

In Mormon tradition and faith, marriages are "for time and all eternity" instead of "until death do us part." While I can no longer claim an authentic stake in that, its memory echoes in my mind and makes me flinch away from phrasing that implies a time to part. I cannot claim to believe I will exist for eternity unless humanity learns to wrest its eternal survival from an uncaring world, but I have always taken marriage to be a commitment with no expiry. My phrasing ("as long as we both shall exist") was the best I could find to convey that.

My writing online has always been personal, but it feels somehow more so to talk about just what my husband means to me. Still, it would hardly do to write a wedding post without trying to capture a bit about the man whose name I took through it and the path that led me to him.

There was no point in my life when I was a closeted gay man. Rather, I thought of myself as both incapable of falling in love and uninterested in it until around the time I stepped away from Mormonism, and frankly wondered if I would remain cut off from that core human experience forever. Noticing my own attraction to men after I left Mormonism, then, came as a profound relief to me—finally, a chance at love—and I never had a reason to obscure it. Even then, though, the core of loneliness and the fear that I was somehow unlovable—at least in a romantic sense—remained.

From the day I met my husband, being with him has felt vital and wholly right. I remember watching him take a silly personality quiz for me on one of our earlier dates and getting my every answer right, remember slowly opening up about every one of my peculiarities and flaws, remember his unconditional and immediate love for me both despite and because of a precise view of me. I remember him asking permission to hug on our first date so cautiously that I couldn't be sure he was even looking for more than a friend, remember the home-cooked Korean food and the kiss he politely offered me on our second date, remember my slowly dawning conviction I had found someone extraordinary. I remember the way, almost immediately, that loneliness faded, replaced with a conviction that I needed him by my side.

It's not that we're identical, or even close to it. It would be a colossal error for me to date someone too like myself. We are instead consciously complementary. He is prudent where I am adventurous, particular where I am laid back, practical where I am idealistic. He tells me stories of the patients he sees and the research he works on, I rant wildly to him about whichever peculiar topic has seized hold of my mind. He goes to bed between 10 and 11 every night he can manage, while I hunch over a keyboard writing until odd hours of the morning every night I don't let him drag me towards a healthier schedule. You are unlikely to see him post much, if ever, online, and with that he anchors me in reality. I feel whole alongside him and can imagine no one I would rather raise a family alongside.

I love him dearly. I am his, now and always.

Conclusion

I'd ask you to forgive the saccharine overload, but you are, after all, reading a wedding essay. It comes with the territory. It's obvious in retrospect why the wedding meant so much to me, but I suppose some things need to be experienced firsthand to be understood. There's more I could go into—more I will go into, really, in the thank-you notes I'm still scrambling to write and the conversations I will continue to have. But this is more than enough for now.

I am, in the end, thrilled to rest and to be done with that weekend. As much as anything else, a wedding carries a sense of duty—to your partner, of course, but just as much to the attendees who spend money and time to celebrate with you. I am not particularly outgoing by nature, but I committed during that weekend to spend as much time as possible with those who had come a long way to be present—whirling between conversations and events and friends and families and responsibilities. It was worth the effort—every bit of it, broadly against my expectations, was worth the effort—but it is an effort I am in no hurry to repeat.

My wedding was beautiful, the sort of storybook wedding children-who-are-not-me dream of, the sort I never planned on or anticipated. I knew I wanted to defy my natural inclination and manifest a ritual that would invite friends and family to see the man I love. From that, despite my own chaotic and sporadic planning, those friends and family wove a gift I cannot help but treasure. For the first time in my life, the scattered fragments of my history and personality came together into a cohesive whole, a moment of being seen as I aim to be, next to the man I am honored to be with. My heart is full.

These are the joyous times.